Monday, July 31, 2017

JUST one taste of victory — one solitary
experience — is enough to inspire hope that that hope can happen again. Even amid
failure after defeat after relapse after disappointment. Amidst trials through
despairs through trauma through calamity. If what occurs to us is juxtaposed
with sight of possibilities, real events that have happened before, a future we
can believe in exists.

Sums up the importance of
revelatory experiences of resurrection. That time or those times where we were
raised without first anticipating it. When somehow, we arose like the phoenix
from the ashes.

Maybe it’s a vision of a time that
hasn’t even happened yet. By definition, a vision.

It doesn’t matter what kind of
reality it is, if it gives hope it fuels faith, and faith compels love to
commit to the journey.

Christian faith is powered by a
phenomenon of miracles; inexplicable encounters where it could only have been
that God acted.

God can provide innovative,
original solutions to age-old problems experienced by all. Only our Lord could
do this, repetitively, according to His own will. Because in God’s economy, all
things are possible.

Ask any Christian who has
experienced some grace they could neither understand nor explain. That hope
that indwells them is unshakable. Though they cannot put a finger on it, they
cannot fail in believing it can happen again. And that faith means they endure
the arduous passage of the journey. To keep stepping faithfully is all that
matters.

Hope is that quality of life that
sits in the memory; an unforgettable grace-gift of God that compels obedience.

Saturday, July 29, 2017

QUITTING cold turkey is the most heroic of acts, and God grants us all
opportunities to achieve such feats. But relapse is not uncommon. I quit
smoking at least six times (for at least a few months up to a few years) before
I finally gave it away fourteen years ago. It was the same with the drink, but
I did need a programmed intervention for that.

A strength of the AA program is its approach to relapse, but it is also
its weakness. Plenty of those who see themselves as alcoholics do so in order
that they never relapse, because they never accord themselves the luxury (or buffoonery)
of picking up even one more drink. One weakness is that AA’s may never
transcend the label, and continue to consider themselves alcoholics, which also
part of the mastery of AA to recover drunks into sobriety. Thankfully, AA
teaches people the model of spiritual progress based on the revolutionary
Twelve Step Program.

I’ve been around recovery programs enough to know that relapses are both
feared and shunned. And this is sad. Sure, relapse is always disappointing.

But the fact is, relapse will be a reality for some, and everyone will
experience relapse in some form or other during their lifetime.

There is a sanctity in the relapse, in that there is the redemptive
nature of the second (even the sixty-second) chance. Recovery itself is a second chance.

It’s the same regarding evangelism and faith. We sow the seed of the
gospel and it falls on various kinds of soil. Few get it first time. Some get
it initially. Most will ‘relapse’ back into the world. Many will never return
to God, but some of the most do reconvert in powerful ways.

It isn’t our prerogative nor even our business when others near us
relapse. Other than to support them. We certainly have no business criticising
or condemning them. It’s God’s mercy that forgives their relapse, just as it is
God’s grace to bring them back.

It’s also none of our business who commit to God and who don’t. That’s
God’s business. Ours is to simply remain faithful in presenting the message of
God faithfully.

God’s love is so potent and so perfect that He allows every person their
will every step of the way. Transformation happens only when a person’s will
joins with God’s will. That’s the sanctity in the relapse — it is in every
person’s sovereign power and choice to relapse or recover and be transformed.

There is sanctity in relapse because God never gives up seeking us for our
recovery. It is for God’s redemptive purpose that we both relapse and recover. It is all about learning.

Friday, July 28, 2017

Blessed are the needy of spirit, for the healing presence of God
is within their grasp.

ALICE was there in our midst,
another anonymous figure at a community kitchen event. I hadn’t even noticed
her. Then I was called into a room with her and two other people to minister
with and pray for her. Alice was experiencing something very familiar to many
of us. She was despairingly fearful, bereft of hope, utterly broken of spirit,
shaken by grief. Her mother had died recently, her rock, a son was being
imprisoned, and her family was imploding around her. She bore these burdens
alone it seemed, and though she faced suicidal ideations daily she sat
awkwardly poised and unable to act, thankfully because of those very burdens of
family she carried.

But, here is the point: she was remarkably
receptive and spiritually amenable.

Nobody thanks God for the pain that
incises the chest of the soul, leaving the heart bare, but ministers of the
Word thank the Holy Spirit for His unction that manifests such eternality of
opportunity. Many people are never this vulnerable, ever.

Alice was open. Situations like
this create a sense of the fear of the Lord.
Openness is vulnerability and vulnerable people are susceptible to
exploitation, which is a failure no minister worth their calling wants to make.
In that moment, we utter a prayer of protection for them as we breathe a prayer
for guidance for ourselves. Courage and awareness is what we need. God supplies
at our surrender to be present to serve.

As she shared, she wept. The
moment, as we might imagine, was palpable. God is at work in moments where the
emotions overflow between strangers. As she wept, I allowed my emotions to
match hers. We listened and waited on her. It was obvious her surrender was
perfectly anointed because she had nothing left of her own ego to fight. We
prayed and counselled her, and when she had regained her poise we tended to her
practical needs.

Then she left. For weeks following,
as the Lord brought her to mind, I’d pray for Alice.

God showed me something through our
interaction with Alice. It coalesces with the quote:

“The gospel is not simply about
meeting people’s needs. The gospel is a critique of our needs, an attempt to
give us needs worth having.”

—
William Willimon

The needs worth having are those desires
that are so purified of vision that they see just one source for fulfilment:
Jesus. I believe Alice, as we encountered her, exemplified something of a
craving that sought Jesus knowing only
Jesus could satisfy. Her neediness was a pure kind, unlike the kind of human
neediness that craves impure things or pure things through impure means or through
poor self-control.

Where there is a genuine spiritual
neediness, human neediness becomes redundant.

*Alice is not her real name.

*Some details in Alice’s story have been altered to protect her
privacy, but there is no exaggeration.

Sunday, July 23, 2017

DIFFICULTY has no purpose in our
lives until it becomes a purpose.
Think about it. Difficulty will otherwise cause us to be frustrated and
miserable if we don’t agree to be motivated by it.

The test comes when we’re next
tempted to lose our cool. Not that turning difficulty into purpose is anything
about perfection; it certainly can be about progress.

This is about the gospel power
latent in our everyday lives. By latent I mean dormant. It remains latent as
long as we go back to our habitual responses of frustration and resentment in
response to difficulty. But this latent gospel power is unleashed with
spectacular effectiveness when we face
our difficulty and make it our purpose; to accept our life, especially the ugly
bits.

This is centrally about accepting
the lives we’ve been given. It’s about debunking the silent wishes to have
another life, or another person’s life.

It’s about making the most of the
life we have — making our purpose to live our lives for the quest of our
purpose.

The moment we begin to truly accept
the life we have, including what perplexes us, we enter chaos with a newfound
peace. We no longer need to resolve anything unless we resolve to make
situations better because we can.

This is a wisdom we can apply with
great effect to any facet of our lives.

As we accept a thing we cannot
change, suddenly there is gospel power in our lives to live with the conundrum.
And often the next step is God’s healing grace, as the miracle of acceptance
falls over us. All for a life that turned its difficulty into its very purpose.

LONGING
for perfection, we strive and struggle all our lives never understanding why we
can’t reconcile a gnawing ache within. It’s a God-shaped hole we’re trying to
fill our own way. And it never works. Fortunately, there is a way.

“None of us are the
blessed virgin Mary. We, with the best of intentions, are all going to pass on
some of our garbage to our children.”

— Richard
Rohr

A
better way of describing the concept of original sin is to rename it inherited sin.

It
was passed down the line. Our fathers and mothers gave it to us unknowingly. We
give it to our children. And it’s inevitable. It’s why we shouldn’t resent our
fathers and mothers for any reason. It’s also why our children cannot blame us
for the damage we inflicted on them, and why we should not feel guilty. We did
our best, just as our parents did their best. All wounds are wounds. It’s all
about what we do with it; the wound.

Our
opportunity is to take our wound and make it a sacred wound, as would be the case if we went through some sort of indigenous
initiation.

Healing
the inherited wound is so simple it’s profound. But it means understanding
something that may take some time accepting. We must forgive. All those who have
hurt us. All those who hurt us today. All those who will hurt us. And especially
forgiving those who believe we have something yet to do to receive their
forgiveness.

Healing
the inherited wound is about tackling our demons of bitterness and resentment.
It’s about forgiveness. Nothing else matters. Forgiveness transforms our wound
making it sacred. And nothing can overcome us when we’ve done that. This is
Jesus’ abundant life. Jesus’ joy is ours.

Tuesday, July 18, 2017

5PM on Friday July 18, 2014, I
strolled through the door clutching flowers for my wife, and her parents’ demeanour
said it all. The moment stood still. As I swung the door open it was as if the
air changed. My father-in-law said, “Sarah needs you in the bedroom, Steve.”
Immediately I knew something had gone horribly wrong. Seconds before I opened
the front door I was mistakenly of the belief that no news was good news. Well,
‘news’ had now been received — the direst news — news you’re never prepared to
receive.

You never forget moments like these. They linger, imprinted on the psyche, like the
moment, the place, the situation we were in, when and where we all learned
about the September 11 attacks.

We were already in
worst-case-scenario land, but this diagnosis of our baby of 22-week’s gestation
was as bad as it was certain. There was no escaping the reality we were plunged
into. Sitting at the end of our bed, in shock, tears salting our cheeks,
searching Google, hands shaking typing out searches and scrolling, trying to
find out what this Pallister-Killian Syndrome was that our baby had. It was
surreal. For the second time in eighteen days our world had been utterly
highjacked, and those interceding days, as well as those that were to come,
were an emotional and mental roller coaster ride.

We did our research even as we were
rocked. We couldn’t just sit and do nothing. We were blessed at that time (within
hours) to reach out to the Pallister-Killian Syndrome Foundation of Australia, and had received contact from them less than
one day later. Seven days later we met the family of the Foundation’s president
face-to-face. They lived in our capital city and only twenty minutes away! They
treated us as family from moment one. We were in contact with the global PKS-Kids group and found the support of their community
a blessing, too. We were being informed at light-speed. When all the hope you
have is information you take it with gratitude! Suddenly there was a care that
seemed perfectly at accord with our circumstance — parents who had experienced
much of what we were facing.

But those minutes the news of our
baby’s diagnosis came in we were shell-shocked. We had thought we were in the
clear, which possibly made the news harder, but there isn’t a time when you’re
prepared for such news; a diagnosis that renders hopeless the chances of your unborn
child’s life being normal even if
they were to survive.

What We Learned

Grief leaves its markers throughout
the rest of our lives. Life never returns to what it was like nor should it — that
is perhaps the greatest loss. What we lost meant too much to leave us
unaffected. Important dates, as in this present situation, can become cherished
anniversaries that form a healthy identity of oral tradition where God’s
faithfulness can be tracked and therefore praised. But I acknowledge that
markers can also continue to be incredibly painful.

We also learned something that Dr Rod Wilsonrecently
put into words. That is, anguish is not
so much an invitation to hopelessness, but to hopefulness — that pain
necessitates the search for hope.
Pain challenges where we place our
hope. We have never seen anyone fail to restore their lives who kept faithfully
searching their way through their
grief process. There really is no other option if we wish to be restored to
hope. The empowering thing is that we who grieve are at the centre of our own
destiny with God who is always
there.

Finally, we have learned about the
inevitability of loss; that grief sweeps its way through our lives at some
point or other. Nobody enjoys it. None are spared of it. All are surprised by
the ferocity of it. God’s purpose in it? To call us beyond the source of our hopes
and into Him who is hope’s very source.

Saturday, July 15, 2017

LET’S use a different word than
suffering: grief — it’s the effect of loss, and suffering
essentially is the condition of grief.

The reason we may rejoice in our
grief is this. There is only one real way to come into the experience of God’s
Presence. The contemplative moment. When eyes and ears and heart are opened,
having been pried open by the circumstances of loss, a moment when with the
denial, bargaining, anger and depression there is an openness to believe God is
there, that He is good, though we can explain it not, His Presence is made
known to us. It’s literally a single moment when God passes by as He did with
Moses. It’s the empathy we feel that no human being can explain or replicate,
but just is. And, suddenly, there, in the midst of an enigmatic anguish, we sit
having encountered what many believers never do, because they’re never taken
to, or they commonly resist, such depths.

Anguish facilitates faith through personal
crisis, but only when we believe God will
meet us in our grief.

God ought to be the answer when
there is no answer. And He is.

We rejoice in our grief by the fact
that our lives testify to the hope that lives in us despite our pain. We have
experienced the risen King and we’ve been blessed by truest conversion in His
way, because He works to resurrect us, not saving us from pain, but glorifying
Himself in us as we endure it with a hope that we can neither understand nor
explain.

The grief we find from such
revelation, however, is so few attest to what we’ve experienced. That can cause
us to doubt the very miracle that, and the God who, resurrected us.

Take this as confirmation. There
are others who have experienced what you have; the joy at peace within you in
spite of your pain. Many may misunderstand. We can appreciate their logic. But
God defies logic, and it takes faith to believe and receive. Choose Him in your
grief and He will choose to come close to you.

Tuesday, July 11, 2017

INNER
experiences of God are a long way away for the dualistic either/or thinker. Yet
we all suffer such a dilemma of being. Continually. Over our entire lifespan. We’re
fortunate to get even one glimpse of the kingdom of heaven, because we’re so restricted
to the capacities of the mind. Yet if we don’t get there, we have no chance of
the Kingdom settling in our hearts. But there is hope. Contemplative prayer is the hope.

Experiences
of the raw Presence of God are rare, let’s be honest. And our dualist,
competitive thinking, our constructs of cognition that become us, is the chief blocker.
Our thoughts are the sum of our preoccupation with the past and our worries/hopes
for the future. We don’t know how to be present.

Because
being present is very uncomfortable and not very rewarding to stay in.

Our
expectations grow amid dreams that will never be our reality. Shocking to read
those words. Horrid. Boredom is the space we occupy when we’re not consumed by
thought of the past and/or future. Frustrations emerge from many unconscious
drives that continue to remain unmet. Cravings never cease, even if we abide in
entertaining hope of perfect sanctification. But there is hope. Contemplative prayer is the hope.

What
we need to do is recognise the truth. In our thinking we’re far from God’s
Presence. Only in the deliberate and definite process of mental letting go is there the ability to admit
our dependence on reducing life to expectations, attributions of boredom,
falling into frustration, and the guilt-cycle for cravings. These are saying we’re
weak mentally, and the only reparation is to engage in contemplation. That is
the way to the unbeatable serenity that accepts what it cannot change.

A
most productive prayer, therefore, is to pray without thinking, all throughout
the day. To simply observe life without judgment, cognisant of God. Prayer at
its root is communion with God. Without thought. Simply observing life without
judgment, in awe of God.

Friday, July 7, 2017

FOR me, grief demands expression.
And yet I can never fully comprehend nor succinctly communicate its mystery,
which is so fitting. Still, there are myriads of caricatures of life made in
the image of grief — showcased through articles, books, videos, testimonies,
real lives, etc — both rousing and
heartbreaking, not to mention countless shards of emotion evoked between which
splinter off without recognition or acknowledgement.

Strangely, until now I have never
recognised that there is a song that expresses how we experienced the ambiguous loss of losing Nathanael in 2014.
The song by Roma Waterman, I Was Carried,
communicates remarkably what we felt occurred to us. Not that we weren’t
susceptible to the depths, to the stresses of an arduous season, nor the
incomprehensibility of the lament we faced continually. I am amazed I never
recognised it until now. But its lyrics are powerfully true to our experience
of loss with Christ.

We were carried in the arms of a
Stronger Man. Somehow in being carried over it all we experienced something
majestically real and ultimately eternal even in the brokenness of it all. How
can we possibly grasp such things?

God often grants the grieving their
evocation of experience, commensurate with their trust; clarity comes with
their preparedness to ‘go there’, which is the reward we get for having the pluck
to go there. And at the very same time there’s the equal-though-opposite
reality: we cannot digest the ugliness of grief. It is insoluble to life. Yet
life cannot come without it.

When it comes to empathy for the
grieving it’s okay to not know what to say. The courage of a simple
acknowledgement to say it means a lot. Everyone ought to know that loss renders
us all completely undone, no matter our part in the story. Honesty is power,
because courage cuts through inauthenticity.

Grief is something I know a lot
about — by experience, observation, and study — but it’s something I’m no closer
to explaining. Because it doesn’t need explaining. Another thing I know,
however, is that expressing our grief (and what we’re learning) helps. It heals
us for the day and the time, knowing that such healing is relevant and palpable
only for the moment, such as how
faith works. It only works as we work it.

But I’m satisfied. (Too bad if I
wasn’t!)

There’s peace in leaving a mystery
as it is, whilst feeling free to give expression to it.

Saturday, July 1, 2017

JULY FIRST. Three years ago, today.
A harmless enough scan, the results of which would propel a ripple of ambiguous
grief through our lives for four months until the gravitas of loss finally
broke our world late on October Thirty.

Heading into that ultrasound room
held no fear for us. We were there to get pictures to show off with our family
and friends. We had no idea what was about to beset us. Clueless.

The teary sheen in the doctor’s
eyes together with his frank words made our dire situation all too clear. We
left those rooms that day in utter shock, carried, I am sure, by God’s very
Spirit.

Sitting at home later that day it
dawned on me. No words of consolidation made any difference (except to
interrupt the sanctity of despair we could not escape). The intent of family
was good. But it made no impact. Shock is numbing. Suspended animation, with no
shape of bliss. If only people would sit and say nothing. Allow the awkwardness
of the moment its shallow victory. If only. You recognize how hard that is, of
course, when you’re the one God has charged to help. But God’s help is always simpler than we think. Still, we
sat and then thought of something that needed to be done, and we’d do it. There
wasn’t much to say other than attempt to make meaning of disaster — an
impossible task. Every loop of thought, within every feeling, lay a conundrum.

But today is special. Not a lot has
gone right for us as far as our plans are concerned these past 1096 days. But
have we learned some brutally deep lessons! About us, about others, about
mystery and compassion, about the truer nature of life, and not least about the
faithfulness of our Creator and Redeemer.

Life is not about what goes right
or wrong according to our own comfort. Life is about accepting the stark
realities we cannot change. It leads us into vistas we’d not otherwise see.
Today I can visit the memory of that July First Twenty-Fourteen day and know
God was there, saving us, thwarting the enemy who sought to destroy us. Today I
can say, we got through. By the grace given us and through the prayers of you,
the saints. Today, though much is left unreconciled, I can love my wife and
family and friends with a better love than ever.

People have often asked me whether
writing about Nathanael helps. You never truly let go of those you lose. We
never truly ‘get over’ it. It will never ‘go away’. (Sorry if that makes you
feel uncomfortable; me speaking about it.) So, writing memorials of our
memories is a sacred way of keeping their memory alive. I no longer see such a
thing as writing about our loss as indulgent. There is only beauty to behold.